Cheryl Strayed's trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, seen here overlooking Lake Tahoe in Reno, Nevada, resulted in a book that is part adventure narrative and part deeply personal reflection.

Cheryl Strayed's trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, seen here overlooking Lake Tahoe in Reno, Nevada, resulted in a book that is part adventure narrative and part deeply personal reflection.

Photo: handout

Author takes off-the-beaten-path approach to enlightenment

1 / 2

Back to Gallery

Just shy of 20 years ago, I took a backpack full of new hiking and camping gear and a head full of youthful pride on a three-day trek through a sultry segment of the Big Thicket National Reserve in the Texas piney woods. It was August, and I was a fool.

I had imagined an excursion of Thoreau-like import: part vision quest, part philosophical exploration, part physical test. What I found was a cauldron of comeuppance. Roots riddled the trail and my new boots blistered my heels. Imposing pines insulated the path, holding in the defeating heat and blocking out the breeze. The mosquitoes treated my DEET repellent as if it were some new and irresistible formula of nondairy topping.

That short trail whipped me, so it was with ample doses of awe and humility that I read Cheryl Strayed's pointedly honest first memoir.

Part adventure narrative, part deeply personal reflection, "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail" chronicles an adventure born of heartbreak.

More Information

'Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail'

By Cheryl Strayed.

Knopf Doubleday, 315 pp., $25.95.

In 1995, three years after her young mother succumbs to lung cancer, Strayed leaves a transient, meandering path of reckless promiscuity and heroin use to embark on a three-month-long journey in "a world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long." This is the Pacific Crest Trail, a ruggedly alluring and sometimes treacherous footpath that runs from Mexico to Canada along the mountain rim of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges

At age 25, Strayed propels herself through more than 1,100 miles of the PCT. Her boots are too small and her backpack bulges with so much unnecessary and heavy gear that she names it "Monster." With this secular cross strapped to her back, the ill-prepared adventurer endures physical and psychological travails, and it is her willingness to explore the latter that separates Strayed's memoir from most "real life" adventure stories. While it is certain that the obvious dangers of the trail are real - the cliffs are high, the path narrow, the ice slick, and the animal life wild - the book's greatest achievement lies in its exploration of the author's emotional landscape.

With flashbacks as organic and natural as memory itself, Strayed mines the bedrock of her past to reveal what rests beneath her compulsion to hike alone across more than one thousand primitive miles: her biological father's abuse and abandonment, her mother's diagnosis and death, and her family's unraveling.

Her evocations of character are brilliant. She offers a parade of sometimes charming, sometimes creepy folks she meets along the trail (who knew that long-distance hikers had groupies?). There's the husband she divorces despite her enduring love for him. There's the heroin-addict lover she shacks up with in Portland. And then there is Lady, her mother's prized horse.

In a horrific scene, Strayed and her brother Leif bungle the job putting the dying mare down, and when the author speaks to the horse, we hear her whispering to the mother whose death has left her all but alone in the world: "I spoke to her and ran my hands over her chestnut coat, murmuring my love and sorrow, begging her forgiveness and understanding. When I looked up, my brother was standing there with his rifle."

Translator

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

Lifestyle

In the end, the Pacific Crest Trail's monotonously quiet and unyielding punishment begets the memoir's most touching realization.

Shivering on a volcanic ridgeline at 6,000 feet of elevation, the author remembers that it is her mother's birthday, the day she would have turned 50, had she lived. What follows is as unexpected as it is inevitable. Strayed begins a cataloging of her mother's faults, a list that ends in a cathartic admission: "She had failed. She had failed. She had so profoundly failed me."

There is, in this moment, graceful and subtle irony. Strayed's candid realization of her mother's failure stands now as a testament to her mother's success. It's humbling, really.

While I gained from my own youthful foray into the wilderness only the simpleminded conviction that air-conditioning is among civilization's most benevolent inventions, Cheryl Strayed emerges from her grief-stricken journey as a practitioner of a rare and vital vocation.

She has become an intrepid cartographer of the human heart.

Bruce Machart is an assistant professor of English at Bridgewater State University. His most recent book is the story collection "Men in the Making."